BioWare veteran Mark Darrah, known for leading the Dragon Age franchise for decades along with Anthem, thinks indie devs who can't outspend massive corporations are the ones pushing "a lot of innovation" in games.
In a new video diving into why AAA games have become risk averse, the former Dragon Age producer said indie teams are often at the forefront of exploring different parts of genres out of necessity since they can't really afford to compete with billion dollar companies at their own game.
"Video games are much more than simply AAA," Darrah said. "We have a large indie space, and indie has shown an ability to innovate and to explore and to try new things. Indeed, a lot of indie development is explore because it's much more difficult to exploit. You can't really make a looter shooter with a team of two people and a $50,000 budget because you're going up against Destiny, you're going up against massive entities that are outspending you by several orders of magnitude."
"So, just to survive, you have to explore other parts of the space," he added. "You might just be exploring a looter shooter with a couple of asterisks on it, but you're still going to be exploring this space to see what else can be done. And so what has been happening is a lot of innovation has been coming up through indie, but I would argue that the big AAA developers should be doing this as well."
Elsewhere, Darrah argued that ballooning budgets and homogenized AAA games are potentially making people more receptive to AI-generated products.
For now, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2026 and beyond.
